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Journal of Art Historiography Number 9 December 2013 Beds and thrones: the reform of aulic space in late eighteenth-century France

Jean-François Bédard

An advocate of pre-Revolutionary monarchy under the Restoration, the Countess de Genlis denounced the artificiality of Napoleonic court culture. She shunned its ludicrous protocol, so different from accepted ancien régime usage, and is said to despised imperial decorative art just as much, finding its inelegant heaviness and pretentious iconography totally foreign to the refined forms of earlier royal furnitureȯunlike later observers who detected continuities between eighteenth-

century neoclassicism and the Empire Style. —ȱ‘Žȱ˜ž—ŽœœȂœȱŸ"Ž , strident Empire

interiors and their bombastic furnishings could hardly mask the"›ȱ™Š›˜—œȂ glaring

lack of social and political legitimacy.2 Napoleonic etiquette was indeed different from that of the old monarchy. While ancien régime protocol established the rank and favour of courtiers according presence, that of the Empire adopted instead a spatial measure.3 As was practised in the households of other European rulers such as the pope, the status of members of the French imperial court was commensurate with how far they were permitted to penetrate an enfilade of rooms, the last of which was reserved exclusively for the emperor. Required to be constantly visible to his subjects, the king of France had bestowed distinction by the duration of his intercourse with courtiers, whereas the Emperor of the French regulated his interactions through a form of architectural triage. This transformation of the ceremonial resulted from a decisive change that occurred during the eighteenth century: the desacralization of the monarchy. From mid-century onward, a more utilitarian understanding of power replaced the in La Réunion. I thank Jean-Philippe Garric for his helpful suggestions.

1 Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin, comtesse de Brulart de Genlis, Dictionnaire critique et

raisonné des étiquettes de la cour, 2 vols, Paris: P. Mongie aîné, 1818, vol. 1, 18-9.

2 Genlis, Dictionnaire, vol. 1, 22-3.

3 Philip Mansel, The Court of France 1789-1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 49-50.

See also the earlier study by Hugh Murray Baillie, ȁEtiquette and the Planning of the State Apartments

in Baroque PalacesȂ, Archaeologia 101 (1967), 192.

Jean-François Bédard Beds and thrones: the reform of aulic space in late eighteenth-

century France 2 religious model emulated by royal absolutism, which had postulated the indivisibility of the physical body of the king from the political body of the kingdom.4 A decline of religious fervour and the advance of critical thinking led to the waning of a Christ-like aura of royal presence and in its place fostered

representations of statehood derived from a strict separation of ‘Žȱ›ž•Ž›Ȃœȱ™Ž›œ˜—ȱ

from his political agency. The shift from the embodiment of power to its external display had profound consequences on the shaping of aulic space. The increasingly spatialized ceremonial led to a greater formalization of rooms, greater attention to their sequence, and renewed scrutiny of the role of furniture and objects in palace

settings. The displacement of attention from the -˜—Š›Œ‘Ȃœȱ‹˜¢ȱ˜ȱ‘"œȱ›"žŠ•"£Žȱ

actions reduced concerns about the needs of his person but increased consideration of the public display of his power. The diminished importance of beds to the benefit of thrones in the late eighteenth-century French court strikingly conveys this change. Unlike other European monarchies, in France it was the ""—Ȃœȱbed and not his throne that had symbolized his temporal power. Louis XIV sat on a throne only in exceptional circumstances, for example when receiving important ambassadors. French kings reclined on a bed when attending the special sessions of the Parlement de Paris (aptly named ȁlits de justiceȂ) during which royal edicts were registered. Yet, the palace plans of innovative architects of the late ancien régimeȯamong them Marie-Joseph Peyre (1730-1785) and his brother Antoine-François (1739-1823), known respectively as Peyre the Elder and Peyre the Youngerȯminimized the grandiose settings for public pageantry, creating extensive enfilades of salons, enormous banqueting halls, and pompous throne rooms, shifting the conception of the royal palace as the ""—Ȃœ residence to the symbolic center of the nation.5 Called upon by Napoleon to give material form to his court protocol, Antoine-François

CŽ¢›ŽȂœȱ™ž™"•œǰȱ‘ŽȱŠ›Œ‘"ŽŒœȱ‘Š›•ŽœȱCŽ›Œ"Ž›ȱǻŗiŜh-1838) and Pierre-Léonard-

François Fontaine (1762-ŗŞśřǼǰȱ™ž›œžŽȱ‘Ž"›ȱ-ŠœŽ›ȂœȱŸ"œ"˜—ȱfor reforming palace

devised for the imperial court longer sequences or rooms, grand banqueting halls, and lavish throne rooms. Paradoxically, they couched the new ceremonial in archaic

forms. Like the Peyre brothers, they looked to antiquity and to Ą˜ž"œȱ7DȂœȱgrand

siècle, but also to the Renaissance palaces of Italy, for the decorative language

4 On this transformation see in particular Roger Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la Révolution

française, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990, Chapter 6: ȁLe roi desacralisé ?Ȃ, 138-66.

5 I thank Jean-Philippe Garric for pointing out the political underpinnings of the transformations in

palace design.

Jean-François Bédard Beds and thrones: the reform of aulic space in late eighteenth-

century France 3 necessary to legitimize the upstart imperial regime.6 They simplified, regularized, and enlarged palace layouts to produce monumental compositions in the manner of Roman imperial architecture. In their furniture and decorative schemes, they favoured large volumes, simple geometric shapes, and flat surfaces unbroken by sculpture, on which they applied large expanses of bright colour and gilding. A militant simplicity, even an ardent primitivism, was at work in Percier and practices of the early eighteenth-century court, they wanted to stamp out the allegedly pernicious influence of Louis XV on palace architecture. They wished to reinstate a perfected grand siècle, purified by a severe vision of antiquity and its Renaissance reinterpretations and suffused with an aesthetic of the sublime. Their innovative plans and archaic decorative forms should lead one to reconsider the walls speakȂ to re-establish the monarchy when he took over the palace of the Tuileries.7 On the contrary, Napoleon and his architects Percier and Fontaine sought a profound reform of French aulic space, a project that the Peyre brothers and other eighteenth-century architects had paradoxically initiated from within the old French court.

Palace reform before the Empire

The emblematic palace of the French monarchy, Versailles was also its most idiosyncratic. Its inadequacies, acknowledged by Louis XIV himself, preoccupied later rulers and their architects. Ange-Jacques Gabriel, replacing his father Jacques Gabriel V as First Architect to Louis XV in April 1742, had proposed several (great scheme), the earliest of which Christopher Tadgell has dated to 1743-1744, Gabriel sought to correct the most incongruous aspects of the château.8 Following in

6 See for instance [Charles Percier, P.F.L. Fontaine et C. L. Bernier], Palais, maisons, et autres édifices

thank Jean-Philippe Garric for bringing to my attention the influence of Italian palace designs on

Percier and Fontaine.

7 Anne-Louis-Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur les principaux événemens de la Révolution Françoise,

ouvrage posthume de Madame la Baronne de Staël, 2nd ed., edited by the Duc de Broglie and the Baron de

Staël, 3 vols, Paris: Delaunay, Libraire et Bossange et Masson, Libraires, 1818, vol. 2, 256-57; cited by

Philip Mansel, The Eagle in Splendour: Napoleon I and his Court, London: George Philip, 1987, 11.

8 Christopher Tadgell, ȁquotesdbs_dbs26.pdfusesText_32

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